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Today the water runs cold and my head’s still loud.

I end up on top of my made bed in clean clothes at eight in the morning, wide awake and worn all the way through, which is the worst combination there is.

I need something that isn’t the inside of my own head.

I pick up the phone, and I stop.

I’m the one who shows up. That’s the whole shape of me. Dottie needed somebody, I showed up. Bo needed somebody, I showed up. The guys at the station, the widows on my street, anybody with a broken fence or a bad night. I’m the hand on the shoulder. I’ve been the hand on the shoulder since I was old enough to be one, because early on I learned there wasn’t going to be one for me, and a man builds himself around the gap.

You don’t call somebody when you’re the one who shows up. You handle it. You put your hands on something broken and you wait for the quiet.

I look at her name on the screen for a long second.

Then I call her anyway.

She picks up on the third ring. Water running behind her, something glass set down.

“Hi, sorry, I’m elbow-deep in a sink, one second.” The water cuts off. “Okay. Hi.”

“Hi.”

That’s all I say. Just hi. But she’s Olivia, and reading a person off two letters is the whole architecture of her job, and I hear her go still.

“Rough one?”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t ask what happened. That’s the thing about her I didn’t know I needed until I had it. Everybody else asks what happened, because they think the details are where the help is. She doesn’t. She’s sat across from enough people to know that sometimes the details are the last thing you can hand over, and that asking just makes a man protect you from his own bad day on top of everything else.

“Are you home?”

“On my bed. Staring at the ceiling.”

“Okay.” A pause, and I can hear her decide something. “My nine o’clock canceled, so I have a whole hour, and I’m going to use it to tell you about my upstairs neighbor, who has begun what I can only call a feud with the mail carrier.”

And she does. The neighbor and the mail carrier and a package allegedly left in the rain. Natalie’s four-minute voice memo about oat milk. Bo texting her from Dottie’s phone to ask whether hamsters see color, and how he took the news that they mostly don’t.

I don’t say much. I don’t have to. She fills the silence with small, warm, unimportant things, on purpose, the way you’d lay a blanket over somebody, and somewhere in the hamster color vision I feel my shoulders come down off my ears for the first time since two in the morning.

“Better?” she asks eventually.

“Yeah. A lot.”

“Good.” Then she goes still, and her voice changes, like she’s stepping somewhere she doesn’t usually go. “Can I do one more thing? You can say no.”

“You can do anything.”

“I want to pray for you. Out loud. I don’t really pray out loud, so it might be bad.”

I have to take a second before I answer, and it’s got nothing to do with last night.

“It won’t be bad.”

She takes a breath. And then Olivia, who ten weeks ago couldn’t make herself walk back into a church, prays for me over the phone.

“God, Luke had a hard night. Remind him that the ones he couldn’t save aren’t a mark against him. And thank You. For him. For all the days it is enough and nobody ever hears about it. Amen.”

I lie there with my eyes shut and the phone against my ear and I don’t say anything for a second, because if I do it’s going to come out wrong.